1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a semiconductor test system with self-inspection of an electrical channel and, more particularly, to a test system for use in a test equipment for IC package.
2. Description of Related Art
In the industry of semiconductor package test, the test bench (machine) and equipment dominate an absolutely important role. If the test bench and equipment are in failure or out of order, big loss in cost will be incurred. In addition, in many occasions of incurring failure or abnormal condition, the bench or equipment itself will not inform or notify the situation and it is hard to trace back when the failure or abnormal condition starts, which quite often results in a serious event of taking back. Not only loss of cost is generated, but also reputation of the company will be affected.
In the test bench and equipment, an electrical channel is mainly used to provide power, I/O and drive for a probe. Pogo pins are used to directly contact a chip or wafer to be tested for testing. As the pogo pins obtain test parameters and send them back through electrical channels, due to that the electrical channels are up to many hundreds or thousands in quantity and are physically visible, inspection of the electrical channels indeed meets with problem. Further, since the electrical channels play a rather important role, once one of the electrical channels is damaged or in an abnormal condition, such as in an unexpected open circuit or short circuit, or in leakage, the whole test quality or test result will be affected.
Although each of the global enterprises in semiconductor test equipments possesses its own techniques of self-inspection of the test bench, they are directed to inspecting the whole equipment, including inspections one by one on each part of the bench and sub-systems. Such inspections waste much time and human labors. As far as the existing techniques are concerned, there is no provision of a system or method with self-inspection of an electrical channel for rapid inspection or adaptively for use in all kinds of equipments produced by all the enterprises.
Therefore, it is desirable to provide an improved semiconductor test system with self-inspection of an electrical channel to mitigate and/or obviate the aforementioned problems.